Jonathan Rosenbaum's Blog: jonathanrosenbaum.com, page 60
March 12, 2008
In the City of Sylvia/Some Photos in the City of Sylvia
Two hypnotic and haunting 2007 features by Spanish experimental filmmaker Jose Luis Guerin, about the same romantic obsession. (The reference points are W.G. Sebald’s novel Vertigo and Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same title.) The silent Some Photos in the City of Sylvia (65 min.) uses black-and-white stills with English intertitles to recount an unseen [...]
March 1, 2008
Big Bad Love
Arliss Howard, making his directorial debut, takes on the self-pity of 60s burnout with decidedly mixed and often sloppy results. Adapted from Larry Brown’s short story collection, the film focuses on a divorced Vietnam vet in Mississippi (Howard) who collects piles of rejection slips for his fiction, gets occasional house-painting jobs from an old war [...]
February 27, 2008
The Other Boleyn Girl
This drama about Anne Boleyn (Natalie Portman) and her sister Mary (Scarlett Johansson) being groomed essentially as prostitutes to service Henry VIII (Eric Bana) might have qualified as some sort of bodice ripper/history lesson. But despite a certain amount of moral outrage and good performances from the lead actresses, it’s neither sexy enough to qualify [...]
The Counterfeiters
Adapted from Adolf Burger’s memoir The Devil’s Workshop, this skillful, absorbing, Oscar-winning Austrian feature involves a Russian-Jewish counterfeiter (expertly played by Karl Markovics) who gets arrested in Berlin, winds up in a German concentration camp in 1944, and is put in charge of a secret forgery unit. Staffed by prisoners who’ve been granted special privileges, [...]
February 21, 2008
February 20, 2008
The Pornographers
The visual brilliance of Shohei Imamura’s kinky and satirical black-and-white ‘Scope feature (1966), about a man who makes eight-millimeter porno loops, often suggests the inventiveness of the French New Wave, but not so much the New Wave features of auteurs like Godard and Truffaut as the more illustrative offshoots of that movement, like Sundays and [...]
Be Kind Rewind
The sweet-tempered Michel Gondry works well with sharp-edged material (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), but his projects as a solo writer-director have been soft and surreal celebrations of innocence that threaten to drift off into whimsy (The Science of Sleep and now this feature). Danny Glover entrusts his run-down video shop in Passaic to [...]
Prisoners Of War
Starting with From the Pole to the Equator (1987), the Milan-based couple Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi have excelled at compiling silent archival footage, encouraging the material to speak, both historically and poetically, through masterful use of music, tinting, and variable speeds. (Their mystical reverence for the footage is reflected in how they commune [...]
Vantage Point
At a historic summit in Spain against global terrorism, the U.S. president (William Hurt) is shot, a bomb explodes, and two federal agents (Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox) rush to find the culprits. This gripping if ridiculous thriller repeatedly backtracks to present the same events from different viewpoints, though ironically it has no viewpoint of [...]
February 13, 2008
Zegen
Shohei Imamura’s mordant, corrosive satire about Japanese imperialism (1987) is based on the autobiography of Iheiji Muraoka, a Japanese barber in Hong Kong who was ordered by the Japanese consulate to spy on Russians in Manchuria in the early 1900s. Played by Ken Ogata, the barber invests his earnings in a brothel and, anticipating the [...]
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Not quite a complete compendium of my published writing, but a very comprehensive one, including all of my writing for the Chicago Reader and most of my writing for other publications (including Film
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